Collective interviewing of suspects

When people are interviewed about possible wrongdoing that has been committed in groups, they typically are interviewed separately. Yet, in several settings it would be more intuitive and convenient to interview suspects together. Importantly, such collective interviews could yield verbal cues to deception. This is the first deception experiment to investigate collective interviewing. Twenty-one pairs of truth tellers and 22 pairs of liars were interviewed pair-wise about having had lunch together in a restaurant. Given that truth tellers adopt a “tell it all” strategy in the interviews while, in contrast, liars prefer to keep their stories simple, we predicted that pairs of truth tellers would (i) interrupt and (ii) correct each other more, and would (iii) add more information to each other's answers than pairs of liars. The results supported these hypotheses. Theory-driven interventions to elicit more cues to deception through simultaneous interviewing are discussed.     

A missing link in suggestibility research: what is known about the behavior of field interviewers in unstructured interviews with young children?

Despite suggestibility researchers' focus on adult behaviors that distort children's reports, whether behaviors examined in experimental work are used in the field is unknown. The current study presents a mutually exclusive and exhaustive hierarchical coding system that reflects interview questioning behaviors of concern in experimental work. The study examined 80 unstructured interviews conducted by 41 field interviewers with 40 children ages 3 to 7 about known events. Data on the use of leading and neutral questions are presented and include distinctions between accurate and inaccurate suggested information. In addition, analyses show that interviewers are consistent in their style of questioning and that a preinterview measure of interviewers' preference for a qualitative versus a quantitative interviewing style predicted the introduction of novel information into the interview.     

Do motivational interviewing behaviors predict reductions in partner aggression for men and women?

Motivational interviewing is a directive, non-confrontational intervention to promote behavior change. The current study examined therapist behaviors during a successful brief motivational interviewing intervention for physically aggressive college dating couples (Woodin & O'Leary, 2010). Forty-five minute motivational interviews with each partner were videotaped and coded using the Motivational Interviewing Treatment Integrity scale (MITI; Moyers, Martin, Manuel, & Miller, 2003). Hierarchical modeling analyses demonstrated that therapist behaviors consistent with motivational interviewing competency predicted significantly greater reductions in physical aggression perpetration following the intervention. Specifically, greater reflection to question ratios by the therapists predicted reductions in aggression for both men and women, greater percentages of open versus closed questions predicted aggression reductions for women, and there was a trend for greater levels of global therapist empathy to predict aggression reductions for women. These findings provide evidence that motivational interviewing seems to have an effect on behavior change through therapist behaviors consistent with the theoretical underpinnings of motivational interviewing.     

Interventive Interviewing: Part III. Intending to Ask Lineal,Circular, Strategic,or Reflexive Questions?

Every question asked by a therapist may be seen to embody some intent and to arise from certain assumptions. Many questions are intended to orient the therapist to the client's situation and experiences; others are asked primarily to provoke therapeutic change. Some questions are based on lineal assumptions about the phenomena being addressed; others are based on circular assumptions. The differences among these questions are not trivial. They tend to have dissimilar effects. This article explores these issues and offers a framework for distinguishing four major groups of questions. The framework may be used by therapists to guide their decision making about what kinds of questions to ask, and by researchers to study different interviewing styles.     

Dynamics in Using Different Question Types in Estonian Police Interviews of Children

The present study examined Estonian police officers' interviewing tactics with children in cases of physical and/or sexual abuse, as there are no published studies conducted in a country formally part of the Soviet Union. Also, the dynamics in using different question types within interviews was examined. Investigative interviews with 66 children (mean age 8 years 10 months, range 4 to 14 years) were transcribed and analyzed. Option‐posing and direct questions were most frequently employed, but invitations produced significantly more information. Four to seven‐year‐old children were asked more suggestive questions than older children. As interviews progressed, the average number of explanations and general invitations per interview decreased, whereas the number of suggestive and option‐posing questions increased. This study suggests that like police officers in other countries, Estonian investigators require training in structured interviewing methods to increase the number of invitations and reduce reliance upon option‐posing and direct questions. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The interviewing computer: A technology for gathering comprehensive treatment information

The interviewing computer is a practical device for gathering comprehensive information on mental health patients. The complex decisions of a treatment science will require a large body of patient facts and an automated interviewing system to elicit such facts, covering the patient’s intake assessment, therapeutic progress, and follow-up stages of treatment. Evidence suggests that the computer interview may equal or excel the interview accomplishments of some clinicians who are unknowledgeable about asking certain clinical questions, forget to ask these questions, or fail to record crucial patient facts. The documentation of each patient’s treatment episode is essential for a treatment science, and the computer interview may represent a technology for achieving this information goal.     

Qualitative Research in Marriage and Family Therapy: Who is in the Interview?

Qualitative interviews are a rich means of gathering information from families. The qualitative interviewer has a choice of interviewing individual family members, multiple family members at the same time, or a combination. The configuration of interviewees is a choice guided by the epistemology of the researcher, research aims, and questions. This article reviews the literature on interviewing different configurations of family members. A content analysis was conducted on articles in the marriage and family therapy literature from 1990 to 2005. Over half of the articles were conducted with individual family members separate from their families. This finding is discussed in the context of the decision regarding whom to interview.     

Collective interviewing: A transactive memory approach towards identifying signs of truthfulness

Group interviewing has been neglected in the deception literature, yet it coincides with recent collective memory research. The present experiment applied the transactive memory theory to a collective interviewing situation and explored whether signs of truthfulness emerged through measuring joint memory recall. Truth-tellers were real couples who had been in a relationship for at least one year and cohabiting. Lying pairs were friends who pretended to be in a relationship for at least one year and cohabiting. All couples were interviewed in their pairs about their ‘real’ or ‘fictitious’ relationships. It was found that truth-telling pairs posed questions to one another, provided cues to one another, handed over remembering responsibility, and finished each others’ sentences significantly more than lying pairs, supporting the idea that real couples have a transactive memory system, unlike pretending couples. Implications for a collective interview approach that considers memory within deception detection are discussed.     

SMALL GROUP BEHAVIORAL TRAINING TO IMPROVE THE JOB INTERVIEW SKILLS REPERTOIRE OF MILDLY RETARDED ADOLESCENTS

Four retarded adolescents, enrolled in a short-term residential treatment program, received behavioral job interview skills training. Although potentially employable, each was unable to present himself effectively in standard employment interviews. Treatment consisted of a series of behavioral group sessions using instructions, modeling and rehearsal procedures to increase, in multiple baseline fashion, such skills as the adolescents' ability to disclose positive information about their experience and background, convey interest in the position and direct relevant questions to an interviewer. Effectiveness of treatment for each client was assessed by: (1) Objective ratings of performance during individual, structured role-play job interviews following each treatment group; (2) objective ratings of pre- and posttraining performance during tape recorded in vivo generalization job interviews at a fast-food restaurant; and (3) global evaluations of pre- and posttraining in vivo generalization interviews made by experienced personnel interviewers unfamiliar with the nature of the treatment. The results indicated that potentially employable retarded citizens can be successfully taught appropriate job interview behavior using a small group behavioral procedure. The need for such techniques in community and rehabilitation centers for retarded citizens and other clinical populations is discussed.     

One and Done? Optimal Decisions From Very Few Samples

In many learning or inference tasks human behavior approximates that of a Bayesian ideal observer, suggesting that, at some level, cognition can be described as Bayesian inference. However, a number of findings have highlighted an intriguing mismatch between human behavior and standard assumptions about optimality: People often appear to make decisions based on just one or a few samples from the appropriate posterior probability distribution, rather than using the full distribution. Although sampling‐based approximations are a common way to implement Bayesian inference, the very limited numbers of samples often used by humans seem insufficient to approximate the required probability distributions very accurately. Here, we consider this discrepancy in the broader framework of statistical decision theory, and ask: If people are making decisions based on samples—but as samples are costly—how many samples should people use to optimize their total expected or worst‐case reward over a large number of decisions? We find that under reasonable assumptions about the time costs of sampling, making many quick but locally suboptimal decisions based on very few samples may be the globally optimal strategy over long periods. These results help to reconcile a large body of work showing sampling‐based or probability matching behavior with the hypothesis that human cognition can be understood in Bayesian terms, and they suggest promising future directions for studies of resource‐constrained cognition.     

Substantive assumptions in interaction: a logical perspective

In this paper we study substantive assumptions in social interaction. By substantive assumptions we mean contingent assumptions about what the players know and believe about each other’s choices and information. We first explain why substantive assumptions are fundamental for the analysis of games and, more generally, social interaction. Then we show that they can be compared formally, and that there exist contexts where no substantive assumptions are being made. Finally we show that the questions raised in this paper are related to a number of issues concerning “large” structures in epistemic game theory.     

Interventive interviewing: Part II. Reflexive questioning as a means to enable self-healing

Reflexive questioning is an aspect of interventive interviewing oriented toward enabling clients or families to generate new patterns of cognition and behavior on their own. The therapist adopts a facilitative posture and deliberately asks those kinds of questions that are liable to open up new possibilities for self-healing. The mechanism for the resultant therapeutic change in clients is postulated to be reflexivity between levels of meaning within their own belief systems. By adopting this mode of enquiry and taking advantage of opportunities to ask a variety of reflexive questions, a therapist may be able to augment the clinical effectiveness of his or her interviews.     

Client perspectives on counselling: Before,during and after

This four‐year study investigated the under‐researched area of first‐time users’ perceptions of counselling and how these evolved over time. Research participants were drawn from six settings within university counselling services, the voluntary sector and primary care. Using an interpretive hermeneutic framework based on thematic analysis, 30 interviews were carried out. Results revealed that before counselling, participants were uncertain about the nature of counselling and what to expect, described stigma associated with peer influence and varying levels of confusion about specialist language. During counselling, participants experienced some level of positive change. At the same time, divergences of counsellor and client perception highlighted theoretical issues concerning counsellor approach and the exploration of emotions. Post‐counselling interviews revealed further positive change, and practical issues with implications for counsellor training and practice in terms of client assessment, preparation for counselling and the influence of cultural assumptions on theory and practice.     

Development of Standard Anchors for Scoring Generic Past-Behaviour Questions in Structured Interviews

A structured interviewing system was developed which included an item bank of pre-written past-behaviour questions. Scoring anchors for each of 168 questions in the item bank were created from analysis of protocols from individual assessments. A concurrent validation study was conducted, focusing on the job of highway patrol sergeant. Job knowledge experts used a job analysis tool to select a subset of twelve questions from the item bank. Panel interviews were conducted with 32 highway patrol sergeants as subjects. Average inter-rater reliability was 0.65 and interview validity was 0.42 for group consensus scores and 0.44 for panel average scores. Discussion focused on practical issues affecting the interviewing system.     

Dynamic Interviewing Program (DIP): automatic online interviews via the instant messenger ICQ.

A Dynamic Interviewing Program (DIP) is presented for automated online interviewing via the instant messaging service ICQ. DIP can conduct parallel structured interviews with several ICQ users at a time, 24 hours a day. The interview itself can be dynamic (branched testing), which means that each question depends on the answer given to the previous one. An online ICQ address book offers the possibility to validate demographic data in order to evaluate data quality. Experiences with DIP and a first empirical study open up new perspectives for Internet-based automatic interviewing.     

A new SAS procedure for latent transition analysis: transitions in dating and sexual risk behavior

The set of statistical methods available to developmentalists is continually being expanded, allowing for questions about change over time to be addressed in new, informative ways. Indeed, new developments in methods to model change over time create the possibility for new research questions to be posed. Latent transition analysis, a longitudinal extension of latent class analysis, is a method that can be used to model development in discrete latent variables, for example, stage processes, over 2 or more times. The current article illustrates this approach using a new SAS procedure, PROC LTA, to model change over time in adolescent and young adult dating and sexual risk behavior. Gender differences are examined, and substance use behaviors are included as predictors of initial status in dating and sexual risk behavior and transitions over time.     

Learning to allocate limited time to decisions with different expected outcomes

The goal of this article is to investigate how human participants allocate their limited time to decisions with different properties. We report the results of two behavioral experiments. In each trial of the experiments, the participant must accumulate noisy information to make a decision. The participants received positive and negative rewards for their correct and incorrect decisions, respectively. The stimulus was designed such that decisions based on more accumulated information were more accurate but took longer. Therefore, the total outcome that a participant could achieve during the limited experiments’ time depended on her “decision threshold”, the amount of information she needed to make a decision. In the first experiment, two types of trials were intermixed randomly: hard and easy. Crucially, the hard trials were associated with smaller positive and negative rewards than the easy trials. A cue presented at the beginning of each trial would indicate the type of the upcoming trial. The optimal strategy was to adopt a small decision threshold for hard trials. The results showed that several of the participants did not learn this simple strategy. We then investigated how the participants adjusted their decision threshold based on the feedback they received in each trial. To this end, we developed and compared 10 computational models for adjusting the decision threshold. The models differ in their assumptions on the shape of the decision thresholds and the way the feedback is used to adjust the decision thresholds. The results of Bayesian model comparison showed that a model with time-varying thresholds whose parameters are updated by a reinforcement learning algorithm is the most likely model. In the second experiment, the cues were not presented. We showed that the optimal strategy is to use a single time-decreasing decision threshold for all trials. The results of the computational modeling showed that the participants did not use this optimal strategy. Instead, they attempted to detect the difficulty of the trial first and then set their decision threshold accordingly.     

Children’s eyewitness memory: A comparison of two interviewing strategies as realized by forensic professionals

A critical issue for developmental psychology is how to obtain accurate and complete eyewitness memory reports from preschoolers without offering suggestions that might result in false allegations. We examined effects of two interviewing strategies (police/verbal interviews and clinician/prop-assisted interviews) on young children’s reports about a medical examination. A total of 58 4-year-olds participated in the study, which conformed to a 2 (Interview Type) × 2 (Number of Interviews) factorial design. Analyses revealed that interviewers spent less time off topic and asked more free recall questions in the police/verbal interviews than in the clinician/prop-assisted interviews. Compared with police/verbal interviews, clinician/prop-assisted interviews resulted in significantly more correct rejections and commission errors in children’s memory reports. However, on a final free recall test, error rates were comparable across conditions. Higher child verbal intelligence predicted memory accuracy in police/verbal interviews, and greater parental attachment anxiety predicted children being asked a higher number of misleading questions. The study provides new insights into interview techniques that promote preschoolers’ accurate eyewitness reports.